Tag: exercise

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We’ve enjoyed the TV series “Arrow” right from the start, and I’ve been particularly amused this season, when it appears that everyone (except the police captain, and maybe poor Felicity) is now a superhero (or supervillian): All of the Arrow’s team have what amounts to superpowers, Merlin has long had them, and now Thea is all trained up, and her sister Laurel is working on it.

In fact, in the Arrowverse, it seems that anybody can develop superpowers with a fairly short period of intense workouts.

Since back in season one, where one could already see this principle at work with Oliver, I was trying to convince Jackie that we ought to become superheros. She expressed a willingness, although I suspect she was just humoring me. I can’t speak for Jackie, but I so far do not seem to have superpowers. Probably my workouts have not been intense enough.

Anyway, the upshot is that I was an easy sell for Six to Start’s new Superhero Workout game, which was just released for Android. Like their “Zombies, Run!” game that I’ve mentioned several times, it gamifies exercise, and I’m a sucker for that. (Not to mention being a sucker for fictional characters getting into shape.)

So far I’ve just done the tutorial and part of the first storyline workout. But even in that little bit, I was already exercising more intensely than I have been. A few more weeks of this, and I’ll no doubt be besting multiple ninja warriors both unarmed and with swords.

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I’m prone to a particular bit of black humor this time of year. Usually a little earlier—maybe at the beginning of November—I’ll mention how early the sunsets are, how late the sunrises are, and point out that things are just going to get worse for six more weeks, and that it’ll be twelve weeks before things are this good again.

I joked similarly to my brother a day or two ago, and he pointed out that, although my joke is true in October or November, in December it’s wrong: by this point in the year things almost don’t get any worse. And he’s right. After all, the word solstice comes from the Latin for standstill.

Today there’s going to be nine and a half hours of daylight, and on the solstice there’s going to be nine and a third hours of daylight. Big whoop. I can deal with that.

Rounded to the nearest minute, we have already reached our earliest sunset of the year. That is, today the sun will set at 4:27. It will continue to set at 4:27 until December 13th, when it will set at 4:28.

(The sunrises continue to get later for a bit. It’s not until December 29th that we get a sunrise at 7:15, and not until January 4th that we get a sunrise at 7:14.)

I didn’t use to take much comfort in this. Knowing that things didn’t get much worse from here on out didn’t help when I was already depressed. But these days I tolerate the dark pretty well, and that means that I can take comfort from knowing that things are already about as bad as they’re going to get. Yes, it will still be mostly indoor exercise weather until March, but that’s okay—I have strategies for indoor exercise.

I’m not sure exactly what to credit for the improvement. I suspect that not working a regular job is the biggest factor, but taking vitamin D supplements seems to have helped as well. And, of course, getting enough exercise is both a cause and an effect.

 

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Jackie and I rode the yellow bus into campus yesterday evening and attended a reception for and talk by Rick Bell about Active Design—using architecture to encourage people to move more, to eat better, etc.

We enjoyed it, and found the ideas very interesting, even though the talk itself was only fair—a long series of slides with pictures of places that exemplified one or another aspect of what he’s talking about, arranged geographically rather than according to the principles he’s suggesting. (The talk would have been more interesting for me if it had been organized by idea, rather than by place.)

One focus throughout the talk was on staircases. Of course any multilevel public space needs to have elevators (to make the space available to people who can’t climb stairs) and perhaps other things as well—ramps, escalators, and so on. But stairs are required too (for fire safety, if nothing else) and Bell points out that staircases can be done well or badly. In a bare concrete box closed in behind fire doors, they’re pretty uninviting. Brought out front and center, they can be wonderful. They can be beautiful design elements—glass stairs can float in the space, mirrored risers can reflect the space, etc. Staircases—if they’re broad enough—can also be places where people gather in small groups to stand or sit together. He had a photo of what I guess is a famous red staircase being used that way. (The talk was for architecture students, and was full of references to famous architecture and architects that mostly meant very little to me.)

He also had some photos of places where these things had been done badly, such as a second-floor fitness center with escalators to the entrance, and no sign of where the stairs might be, even if you wanted to use them.

There’s a lot to Active Design besides staircases—walkable spaces, bicycling infrastructure, creating (often re-creating) multimodal transportation infrastructure (like having bike paths and foot paths lead to and from the bus station, and having the bus station co-located with the train station and a bicycle rental place), seasonally appropriate spaces (like skating rinks), bringing food production into the city center, etc.

I’m glad we went. I’m glad we went by bus, rather than driving.

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I’ve been losing weight for the past few years, and wanted to share a small milestone: With a body mass index of 24.9, I am now in the range the National Institutes of Health consider “normal weight.”

It’s been a strange process. Subcutaneous fat departs on its own schedule—probably mostly genetic, but probably other things as well—so I’ve had the experience of bodyparts changing shape at unexpected times. A few months ago I noticed something hard in my side, a couple of inches down from my ribs. It took some seconds of poking with my finger, tracing out the contours, for me to realize it was my pelvis. (For someone who assembled a Visible Man in elementary school, I had a surprisingly poor conception of where the pelvis is. I thought of it as being down by my hips, but the top of the iliac crest comes up to the height of the navel, I guess.) I had similar, if less startling, experiences with other bits of my skeleton, including my ribs and my cheekbones.

I wish I had a better understanding of what changed. I’d been overweight essentially all my adult life. I’d been trying, largely without success, to lose weight for 40 years. Then, a few years ago, something changed, and the weight started gradually coming off.

I did make an effort to eat less, and to exercise more, but I’d done those things a hundred times before.

I know some of the things that changed. I quit working a regular job, so I had more time for exercise, and more flexibility in my schedule to schedule the exercise. I started studying taiji, which is not an especially vigorous exercise, but which I now do almost every day—and consistency has a vigor all its own. Jackie’s willingness (and creativity) in producing healthy meals that conform to my odd preferences has been a big help.

One other thing that was different from all the other times was that this time I didn’t have a goal weight.

All the other times I had an idea in my head that I wanted to lose 15 or 45 pounds, and I’d calculate how many weeks that would take if I had a calorie deficit of this or that amount. Then I’d track my weight, and be pleased or disappointed as it progressed along or deviated from that track.

This time I didn’t do that. Instead, I decided that my goal was simply having a downward trend to my weight. Being in calorie deficit would (I figured) improve my blood chemistry, and probably right away get me most of the health benefits of losing weight.

Since I don’t have a goal, I’m not at an inflection point here, now that I’m at “normal weight.” I can just carry on doing what I’ve been doing. I’m in no danger of becoming underweight any time soon. (The National Institutes of Health suggest I’d be “underweight” if I lost another 40 pounds.) So, I’ll go on gradually losing weight for a while. I expect it will become more and more gradual over the next year or two, before I eventually stabilize, probably not too far from the midpoint between “underweight” and “overweight.”

There’s no evidence for a health benefit to weighing less than I do now, but probably some health benefits to being in calorie deficit—so it makes sense to prolong that phase.

There are, of course, the other benefits to losing weight. There’s an aesthetic benefit. (At least, I think I look better now than I did 40 pounds ago, and expect I’ll look better still if I lose another few pounds.) There’s a convenience benefit. (Society has upsized almost everything as Americans have gotten larger—the main exception being coach seats on airliners—but being slimmer still makes almost everything easier and more comfortable.)

If I lose another 15 pounds or so, I’ll be at the same body mass index as Jackie. She’s most fetchingly slim, and there’s a certain symmetry to us matching that way, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a goal. Just a whimsy, really.

I promised a while back that this wouldn’t becoming a weight-loss blog, and I think I’ve kept that promise, but this was a milestone that I wanted to share. I’m not sure there’ll be any more, though. Since I don’t have a goal, there’ll really be nothing to announce.

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I’ve been waiting to post about how successful my new daily routine has been until I’ve had at least one day where I actually followed it in each particular, and today was that day.

In fact, just aiming at my new routine has been enough to increase my productivity quite a bit. I’ve had at least one writing session nearly every day, and I’ve gotten some sort of exercise nearly every day, and most days have had plenty of both.

So, the new daily routine has been at least a modest success so far.

Today:

  • I wrote early.
  • I went to the Fitness Center and lifted weights.
  • I came back and wrote some more.
  • I had a light lunch.
  • I went out and experimented with combining Zombies, Run! and Ingress. (It seemed to work okay, as long as I paused Zombies before trying to Ingress.)
  • I came back home and put a final polish on a Wise Bread post I’d written a few days ago, then shared it with the editors.

Having accomplished all that stuff, figure I’m free to do whatever I want for the rest of the day.

By the way, here’s my zombie-ingress outing as tracked by Zombies, Run. I went 3.61 km (which works out to 2.24 miles) in 1:28:22. That would be a very slow run, but it was fine for a walk where I was spent many minutes standing around at portals. (I left the program in kilometers rather than miles, only because Ingress does everything in kilometers. I’ll probably change it, though. I think in miles when I run.)

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I’m having pretty good success with my new daily routine.

Things haven’t gone perfectly. One day last week I was coming down with a virus and took a sick day—no fiction writing got done. Yesterday’s bitter cold kept me from getting out to exercise—no walking, no lifting, and no taiji.

Today, things went pretty much according to plan. I had breakfast at 6:30, got to work at 7:00, and wrote until 8:30. Then I bundled up (still pretty darned cold) and walked to the Fitness Center, where I did my usual lifting and stretching, followed by about 25 minutes of qigong and taiji. I deviated from my schedule a bit, having an early lunch before getting back to fiction writing, but I did do two 90-minute sessions, which were both reasonably productive.

The novel’s word count has actually been soaring, because I’ve been slotting back in bits and pieces that I’d pulled out in a previous restructuring effort, now that I’ve got a better idea where they go. I’ve just about finished that phase, and it is almost time to settle in for the next major phase of writing new prose. (Which I’m all excited about, because that’s the fun part.)

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One reason I haven’t been more productive these past two years is that I’ve let my fitness activities consume the morning hours that are my prime writing time. I know that, and I want to free that time up for writing, but I’m loath to give up my taiji, because of the way it has been almost miraculous in changing my body for the better.

Five years ago I was starting to feel old. I could still do all the ordinary stuff I needed to do every day, but my spare capacity was shrinking. My balance and flexibility and strength and endurance were all less than they had been—and only just barely good enough. Any unusual stress, such as carrying something heavy up or down stairs, or moving across rough or shifting terrain, seemed dangerous. I had trouble getting a full night’s sleep, because my back would ache after lying still for a few hours.

Taiji (together with lifting) turned that completely around. I feel better than I’ve felt in years. I really don’t want to give that up.

The problem is, I’ve been devoting a huge chunk of each morning to the lifting and the taiji class, and morning is by far my most productive time to write.

Fortunately, I think I’ve figured out a way to deal with that. The key—and I’ve known this for a long time—is to start my writing first. Once I’ve had a solid writing session, taking a break for some exercise is perfect. After that, I can get back to writing. (Whereas I’ve found it very hard to start writing after a long morning of exercise.)

The way we’d been doing it, we’d do our lifting before taiji. We briefly experimented with doing the lifting after taiji, but I found that hurt my knees. (My theory is that the taiji tired out the small muscles that stabilize my knees, making them just a little too wobbly for heavy lifting.) This has been great for actually doing the lifting, but has meant an awfully early start to the day—too early to fit in writing first.

So, during the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, while the taiji class is on break, I’m experimenting with a new daily routine. I’m still tweaking it, but as currently sketched out, it looks like this:

  • At 7:00, right after breakfast, I sit down to write fiction, and work for 90 minutes.
  • At 8:30 I take a break and spend the hour from 9:00 to 10:00 engaging in some fitness activity: lifting or taiji. (Once the class resumes, I’ll do the class on days that it meets, and lift on the other days.)
  • Back home by 10:30, I write fiction for another 90 minutes, then break for lunch at noon.
  • After lunch I get back outside and walk again. Lately I’ve been using this time to play Ingress, but in the summer I may just walk, go for a run, or whatever.
  • In the mid-to-late afternoon, I may do a bit more work on some writing-related activity: Writing non-fiction (such as a Wise Bread post), revising stories, submitting stuff to editors, critiquing work for the Incognitos, etc.

I’m trying to be a bit more careful about social media, because of how easy it is to fritter away a whole morning reading stuff my friends have found interesting, without abandoning it. Right now I’m checking social media briefly before breakfast, then staying away from it until after lunch, then pretty much allowing unlimited checking in the afternoons.

I’ve been doing this for more than a week now (with the modification that on Saturday and Sunday I just do one fiction-writing session, rather than two). It’s going great so far—I’ve gotten several thousand words written on my novel.

I’ll keep you posted.

[The core of this post was originally written as part of my year-end summary of my writing. However, not being about my writing in 2013, it didn’t belong there, so I’ve pulled it out and made it a post of its own.]

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I’ve been practicing taiji for more than 4 years now. Jackie and I started with a 16-week class at OLLI, after which we continued studying with the same teacher, Mike Reed, at the Savoy Recreation center.

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Me teaching the summer Park District class. Photo by Steven D. Brewer, used with permission.

The OLLI class taught an 8-movement form, the same form I taught my students when I taught a taiji class for the Champaign Park District this summer. We continued to do that form in the Savoy Rec classes, but also started learning a form that consisted of the first 12 of the Chen 48-movement form. Fairly early on, Mike proceeded to teach us the second 12 movements, so that we had a 24-movement form.

We stuck with that 24-movement form for a long time—I think we went most of a year without adding any new movements.

Jackie and I and a couple of other students bugged Mike about adding more movements, but he resisted. I think I now understand the reasons. The first 24 movements are pretty easy to do. That is, learning the whole sequence takes a while, and doing them exactly right may be difficult, but no individual piece of any of the movements is physically very challenging. Starting early in the second half of the 48, there are a number of movements that are considerably more challenging: Hops, jumps, kicks, and pivots—sometimes in combinations—that Mike hesitated to try to teach to a class where I’m the youngest guy there.

Eventually, after maybe a year, we wore him down. A year and a half ago, we got through the third 12 movements (somewhat modified, to reduce the aggressiveness of some of the jump-kicks and hopping pivots). This fall, we’ve learned the final 12 movements, doing the last two last week.

Today, for the first time, we did the whole 48-movement form from beginning to end.

I still have a lot to learn, even about the first movements—and, of course, I barely know the last few. But that’s okay. One of the first things I learned in taiji—that I should have learned from my previous studies of martial arts, but somehow didn’t—is that taiji isn’t something that you learn: it’s something that you do.

Now I can do a bit more. That’s all. And yet, it’s kind of a big deal to me.

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For about six weeks now, I’ve been playing Ingress.

It’s a game. You could almost call it a video game—you see what’s happening on a video screen—but to play you have to go outside: The action of the game happens at specific places in the real world.

The conceit of the game is that matter from another dimension is intruding into our world via portals. In our world, these portals appear as works of public art or unique architecture. Via the game (running on an Android phone or tablet), you can locate and manipulate these portals.

I’ve been having a great time. I’m working with a half-dozen or so local Resistance players, some new like me, others already at level 8 and mainly providing support (since they’re no longer working to level up themselves).

The structure of the game encourages team play—building a powerful portal requires multiple high-level players to work together. But the team play doesn’t need to be simultaneous, just somewhat coordinated. Lower-level players can make faster progress if they play with a higher-level player, but it’s not necessary.

Screenshot_2013-11-01-11-15-12Besides the pleasures of loosely integrated, minimal-pressure teamwork, the other great thing about the game is that, because it takes place in the real world, to play it you have to go out in the real world. The game reports on how far you’ve walked in the course of playing it—for me, 50 km in the past six weeks. (See “Distance walked” in screenshot.) I credit that walking with helping me maintain my weight even though I haven’t been able to run for the past month.

I’m also really into the public art aspect of the game. I was already a huge fan of public art, but the game has made me connect with individual works in a way that I hadn’t. I’m aware of individual pieces in a whole new way—how they relate in space with one another and with other aspects of the community. (Although it is a different experience now to go for a walk downtown. Even when I’m not playing, I’m aware that certain works that are portals in the game. I have to remember that most people are not.)

Anyway, Ingress is now in open beta. If you have an Android device, you can just download the game and go.

I recommend it.

If you’re local and play, get in touch. I’d be glad to help you level up.

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I hurt my ankle last month, and had to quit running.

There was no injury event. In late September I had two weeks of very modest running and fairly modest walking—and then one night (after a rest day!) turning over in bed made my ankle hurt bad enough that it woke me up.

It didn’t seem bad. I quit running and waited for it to get better. Except it turned out to be easily reinjured. (It seemed especially prone to reinjury related to bus riding. Three different times I hurt it that way—once running to catch a bus, once stepping down from the bus and landing hard on that foot, and once just stepping up into the bus pushing off with that foot.)

After about three weeks, I began to think that maybe it was a stress fraction or some other injury that might need more than just rest to get better. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t, and it didn’t.)

I went to see my doctor, who ordered x-rays and a podiatry consult. The podiatrist I saw was an orthopedic surgeon, who had quit doing surgery to do this instead.

According to my orthopedic surgeon/podiatrist, there was no sign of a stress fracture—but it almost didn’t matter anyway, because stress fractures of the ankle and leg (except at the head of the femur) very rarely dislocate. The treatment for almost any injury of this sort is just to rest it until it gets better.

My formal diagnosis was peroneal tendonitis.

My ankle seems to finally be about all better. Yesterday I (once again) carelessly ran for the bus—and this time it didn’t hurt! However, Jackie has several tasks for me to accomplish over the next few days, and doesn’t want me to be unable to accomplish them because I’m hobbling around. So I’ve agreed to hold off on running for one more week.

My orthopedic surgeon/podiatrist is also a runner, and he sounds just like a runner. Jackie asked if my having switched to minimalist shoes the previous summer might have put me at more risk for injury. The doctor didn’t seem to think so, and mentioned that he had started wearing five-finger shoes for his short training runs. He had liked them well enough, that when it came time for his half-marathon, he’d abruptly decided to wear them for the race, even though he hadn’t been wearing them for his long training runs. Said it worked out fine for him.

I expect the same will be true of me. I’ll resolve to be more careful about adding distance next year, but I doubt if my resolution will make much difference. Long runs feel too good.

As Steven says, “Running is great exercise between injures.”

My only real hope is to do a better job of maintaining a base level of fitness over the winter, and I have a plan for doing so.